When a washed up former war hero and film star Red Elwell is brutally stabbed at the site of the heroic WWII battle he won for America, a journalist is dispatched by a New Yorker-like publication to do an in-depth piece on the mystery of his death. Booker likes women (this book introduced me to a lot of new words, but my favorite was "fellatrix") and the New York lifestyle, but keeps some of his Texas attitude because it sells articles. He doesn't know anything about Micronesia or Palau before he gets there, but he gets a crash course from some of his connections once he arrives. And he gets much more than he bargained for with this story.

Was the perpetrator a Japanese soldier that has been hiding out in the mountains for 25 years, unaware that WWII is over? How about a rabble-rousing Island politician that wants to upset Palau's American colonizers? What about some Japanese tourists that scour the battle site for bones that could belong to their relatives killed in the war? Sounds spine-tingly-dingly!

I wasn't sure about this book for most of the time I was reading it. I kept expecting it to come to some really racist conclusion, but everyone portrayed seemed pretty much equally lousy and ignoble.

Even the initially cringe-worthy portrayal of world's sexiest Island prostitute that our hero becomes infatuated with had a different purpose in the end. Dude. I know Booker is supposed to be the hero of the story, but he is portrayed as very dumb for thinking that Inez actually likes him. She is just doing her job, and she is very, very good at it. It wasn't until the next morning until I realized what the author really did with her at the end. Well played, sir. ( )